Research Projects

I am a Co-investigator in this project, which is led by Alan Love (University of Minnesota), C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary), Marcel Weber (University of Geneva), and William C. Wimsatt (University of Minnesota)

Scientific metaphysics is based on the idea that metaphysics — the study of what the world is ultimately like — should be informed by the remarkable success of science. Opponents argue that the continuous rejection of fundamental scientific claims through history undermines the assumption that science can provide a reliable basis for drawing metaphysical conclusions. From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics is a three-year initiative involving a collaboration between the University of Calgary, University of Geneva, and University of Minnesota that advances a new approach for scientific metaphysics. The project analyzes successful scientific practices that depend on modest theoretical claims but nevertheless undergird advances across sciences that deal with complexity, especially in biology. This approach probes the metaphysical implications of stable forms of successful practice in situations where local, partial theories of complex phenomena do not yield integrated, comprehensive outlooks across different levels of organization.

In recent decades, the focus of scientific research has shifted more and more to trying to understand and handle the complexity of nature. In biology, for instance, the reductionistic view that the behavior of a biological system can be understood by studying its parts in isolation has been replaced by approaches that try to account for the “wholeness” of biological systems by paying attention to the organization of and interactions between the system’s parts (e.g., by studying the dynamics of entire gene regulatory networks). This project addresses the question of whether these developments in the life sciences call for a revision of our traditional philosophical theories about science and nature, such as our theories of explanation and causation. The project focuses on two sets of questions: First, do traditional accounts of explanation capture the peculiarities of explanations characteristic for the sciences of complex systems? Or do explanations of the behavior of complex systems constitute a unique kind of biological explanation that cannot be subsumed under traditional accounts, for example, because they are non-mechanistic and non-reductive? Second, do standard theories of causation fail to account for the causal structure of complex biological systems, for instance, for the multiplicity of causes, the context-dependency, and the putative top-down character of their causal relations? Do the characteristics of the causal structure of complex biological systems give rise to any challenges or constraints for developing a philosophical theory of causation?

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

The Concept of Mechanism in the Life Sciences (Nov 2009 – Oct 2012)

This project examines the concept of mechanism and accounts of mechanistic explanation that have played a prominent role in the philosophy of the life sciences in the past years. Even though the notion of a mechanism has been subject to considerable discussion, so far no consensus has been reached about what a mechanism is and how it relates to other concepts such as the concept of a law, of a cause, and of a disposition. The aim of this project is to analyze paradigmatic examples of mechanisms and mechanistic explanations from the practice of the life sciences to clarify these conceptual relations. The starting point of this project is the assumption that biological and medical mechanisms can be understood as underlying the behavior of a whole. This raises the question of whether mechanistic explanations can be understood as part-whole explanations with a temporal dimension (causal micro explanations).